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So yesterday’s drama. I get a call around 11AM. It’s from a UPS representative. (Possibly a driver? He didn’t explain.) “So we have this package you sent, and the phone number for the customer is bad, do you have any other way of reaching them.” “Why, what’s the problem?” “Well, the address…” (It’s like, a regular street address. Like, 710 State St., something like that.) “It’s a post office.” “What??!” If there’s a PO box, we absolutely know better than to try to send UPS packages to it, that doesn’t work. I look again: No PO Box. No mention at all of a post office of any kind. “Yeah,” the UPS guy says wryly, “it’s just– a post office. We can’t just. Deliver some dude’s package to a post office. It’s got to go somewhere that somebody can receive it. A post office isn’t just going to accept a package to, like, the lobby.”
So we begin the process of trying to contact the guy, UPS agrees to hold the package– we paid $20 to send it, after all; this is Montana, and it’s not cheap to send shit there. Finally we get ahold of the guy, around 3 PM.
He’s vacationing in Yellowstone National Park, and he lives in Alaska, where UPS really doesn’t deliver except for absolutely exorbitant fees. He just decided to do his shopping (this is an $1800 item, btw) and have it delivered to the post office nearest the park. He figured, after 0 research, that it should work that way, you should just be able to have stuff delivered to any old post office, and then you can go in and tell them who you are and they give it to you.
Yes, we explained, they do that, for anyone who rents a PO box there, and then uses the PO Box in their address. I don’t know how much it costs but it does cost money. Because otherwise just every single post office would be this huge jumble of packages they’d have to wade through all the time to find people’s shit. They charge money for that service because it’s a service they do provide. If you pay for it.
He had done absolutely zero research into this and had devoted no thought to it.
“UPS will send packages to their own locations, though,” we pointed out. This is true! If you can’t sign for a package at home they’ll drop it off at various drop points. I don’t think you can just have a package sent directly to the UPS store or dropoff point, but if you don’t have a reliable address there’s probably a way to hack that. I bet if you looked into it a bit you could find out.
“Yeah,” he said, “but the nearest one is far away, so I didn’t want to do that, so I figured I’d just give the address of a post office.”
“You didn’t think to, like, ask the post office if you could do that,” we said. The answer, self-evident: No. Just assumed.
Well, for the record: you can’t do that.
Homeboy’s got three days to get his dumb ass to Bozeman, which is the nearest place UPS drops off packages. Otherwise it’s coming back to us, and we are absolutely withholding that shipping charge from his fucking refund. (“Free shipping” means you don’t pay for it separately, not that it’s actually fucking free.)
Dumbass motherfucker did this during everyone’s busiest season so we get to also enjoy being on hold with UPS for eighty years trying to arrange this for him. Fuck you, buddy, I hope your total lack of planning hurts you as much as it hurt us.
So, like, in general, here’s my life advice: If a thing you want is a service someone charges money for, best to check around and see if they’ll do it for free first before assuming that they will. The answer’s probably no: they probably charge money for it for a reason. Just a general guideline, there.
So yesterday’s drama. I get a call around 11AM. It’s from a UPS representative. (Possibly a driver? He didn’t explain.) “So we have this package you sent, and the phone number for the customer is bad, do you have any other way of reaching them.” “Why, what’s the problem?” “Well, the address…” (It’s like, a regular street address. Like, 710 State St., something like that.) “It’s a post office.” “What??!” If there’s a PO box, we absolutely know better than to try to send UPS packages to it, that doesn’t work. I look again: No PO Box. No mention at all of a post office of any kind. “Yeah,” the UPS guy says wryly, “it’s just– a post office. We can’t just. Deliver some dude’s package to a post office. It’s got to go somewhere that somebody can receive it. A post office isn’t just going to accept a package to, like, the lobby.”
So we begin the process of trying to contact the guy, UPS agrees to hold the package– we paid $20 to send it, after all; this is Montana, and it’s not cheap to send shit there. Finally we get ahold of the guy, around 3 PM.
He’s vacationing in Yellowstone National Park, and he lives in Alaska, where UPS really doesn’t deliver except for absolutely exorbitant fees. He just decided to do his shopping (this is an $1800 item, btw) and have it delivered to the post office nearest the park. He figured, after 0 research, that it should work that way, you should just be able to have stuff delivered to any old post office, and then you can go in and tell them who you are and they give it to you.
Yes, we explained, they do that, for anyone who rents a PO box there, and then uses the PO Box in their address. I don’t know how much it costs but it does cost money. Because otherwise just every single post office would be this huge jumble of packages they’d have to wade through all the time to find people’s shit. They charge money for that service because it’s a service they do provide. If you pay for it.
He had done absolutely zero research into this and had devoted no thought to it.
“UPS will send packages to their own locations, though,” we pointed out. This is true! If you can’t sign for a package at home they’ll drop it off at various drop points. I don’t think you can just have a package sent directly to the UPS store or dropoff point, but if you don’t have a reliable address there’s probably a way to hack that. I bet if you looked into it a bit you could find out.
“Yeah,” he said, “but the nearest one is far away, so I didn’t want to do that, so I figured I’d just give the address of a post office.”
“You didn’t think to, like, ask the post office if you could do that,” we said. The answer, self-evident: No. Just assumed.
Well, for the record: you can’t do that.
Homeboy’s got three days to get his dumb ass to Bozeman, which is the nearest place UPS drops off packages. Otherwise it’s coming back to us, and we are absolutely withholding that shipping charge from his fucking refund. (“Free shipping” means you don’t pay for it separately, not that it’s actually fucking free.)
Dumbass motherfucker did this during everyone’s busiest season so we get to also enjoy being on hold with UPS for eighty years trying to arrange this for him. Fuck you, buddy, I hope your total lack of planning hurts you as much as it hurt us.
So, like, in general, here’s my life advice: If a thing you want is a service someone charges money for, best to check around and see if they’ll do it for free first before assuming that they will. The answer’s probably no: they probably charge money for it for a reason. Just a general guideline, there.
